Tag: Persistence

Self discipline is basically a collection of good habits, that we stick to on a regular basis. One way improve it is to gradually create a new habits that improve our life for the better. The problem with habits is that you can’t create them overnight. According to research, it takes about 3 weeks or 21 days to create a new lasting habit. It’s easy to do something new for a couple of days, but can you stick to it for 3 weeks?

This is where HabitForge.com comes it. Its a very simple site that allows you create new habits by sending you reminders after each day, asking you about your progress. After you sign up you can start creating new habit right away with a very simple process. First you have to choose a new habit. Let’s say you’re are not eating breakfast and you want to improve your eating habits by having a healthy breakfast every day. When you create a new habit at habitforge you have to complete the following question that you will be asked every day: Were you successful yesterday at___________________. So in our case that would be “Were you successful yesterday at having a healthy breakfast”. And that’s all there is to it! You are done and after the day is over, you will be sent that question to your email address and can answer either Yes or No. If you answer Yes you had a successful day, but if you answer No, then you have to start all over again! The habit is only considered created after you do it for 21 consecutive days. If you manage 20 days but fail the last day you will have to start all over again, so that will give you extra motivation to really stick to it!

Habitforge also offers additional options for advanced users. You can write some personal motivation details when creating a habit. That includes what are the negative and positive consequences for creating this habit. You will be reminded of that in your daily emails. You can also create a public link that will enable your friends to see the habit that you are creating. That will create some peer pressure to further enable you to create a new habit successfully and improve. Another option is to choose just some days of the week in which you will monition success, as with some habits not all days might be relevant. For example you decide to start exercising 4 days per week.

Try HabitForge.com today. It’s totally free and worth giving a shot if it can potentially create new positive habits for your life and improve self discipline.

According to personal development author and blogger Steve Pavlina there are five pillars of self discipline:

Acceptance

Willpower

Hard work

Industry

Persistence

Let’s take a look at each of those five.

Acceptance.
Acceptance means that you look at your life and asses where are you standing right now in regards to self discipline. It’s best to look at each area of our life separately as we might actually be quite disciplined in some areas and less in others. Identify your weakest areas and your strongest one. How disciplined are you in your dieting? Do you keep your desk and work environment clean and neat? Do you get adequate exercise? Do you work all the time you are at work? Are you educating yourself in your field?
We can only improve once we know where we stand now. Until we accept we lack self discipline in some areas, its hard to move forward. Once we understand where we are, we can make a proper plan to improve our self discipline for each area of our life.

Willpower
Willpower allows us to break through our comfort zone and make gradual improvement in our life necessary to change it for the better. The problem with willpower is that we only have a limited amount of it. You might have experienced that yourself when you went on a diet. You managed to stick with it a few days then you went back to eating the old ways. Your willpower has worn off. That’s why it’s important to use our willpower strategically. Willpower is like a spearhead of self discipline. Its very powerful but we only have a limited amount of it. That’s why its important to set our environment in a way that requires the least amount of willpower.
If you want to go on a diet, throw all your junk food out of your fridge so you don’t have to waste your willpower to resist eating that cupcake. Prepare healthy means in advance for the whole week. That way it will be easy to diet as you will open the fridge with the right meals already waiting there for you. You will only use willpower to prepare the meals and make decision to go on a diet.
It’s also smart not to overwhelm yourself with too many habit changes at once. Take it one habit at the time. Don’t try to stop smoking, get fit, improve your education, cut down on TV from your life all at once. It will be too hard. Take it one habit at the time and use your willpower strategically.

Hard work
You must realize that there is no way around hard if you want to be successful in life. You might get lucky once in a while but for lasting success hard work is mandatory. Hard work is a work that challenges you, both physically and mentally. Hard work makes you grow, as you constantly push to the limits and expand yourself. Develop hard work and you will greatly improve your self discipline too.
With hard work you take a drivers seat in your life instead of being a passive observer and go wherever life takes you by itself. You might be fine with just going with the flow, but you might not be fine with where that takes you eventually, like ending up broke or sick. Everything in life requires hard work from being in shape, to being educated, happy in relationship and running a successful business. When you have a purpose in life hard work is easier, if you have a strong enough why, you will manage to push through any obstacle.

Industry
Industry means putting in the hours. Doing the work that needs to be done. Its not the same as hard work. Hard work is doing the work that is challenging, but you can be industrious doing the easy work too. For example, if you want to go on a diet you have to prepare the healthy food. That’s not particularly challenging once you know how to it but it takes time and people will often just eat a snack bar because its easy. Industry will get the job done but it won’t tell you what you have to do. That’s why its important to be clear about where you are now and where do you want to go.

Persistence
Persistence is when you get tired of doing the hard work but you keep working hard anyway. That can only be achieved, if you have a clear purpose. Hard work is how you achieve your goals. Purpose is why do you want to achieve them and with perseverance you get there if you have a clear vision. That doesn’t mean you have to be stubborn and stick to your goals for decades. Be smart, people change their goals too, but when you have a clear vision and plan how to get there you must keep pushing hard.
Persistence will create its own positive cycle. When you work hard on your goals you start to see results. Those results will give you more motivation to keep working hard to create more results that will give you even more motivation.

Take a look at these five pillars in your own life and identify which one is the weakest. Then work on improving it. Slowly, one step at the time:)